


We Can Work Out The Rest

by onethingconstant



Series: The Hell's Kitchen Survivors' Group and Drinking Club [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Friendship, Gen, Investigation, noir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:09:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5521523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onethingconstant/pseuds/onethingconstant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"You wanna get a drink sometime?"</i>
</p><p>
  <i>"I'm kinda in a relationship right now. Friends with no benefits."</i>
</p><p>
  <i>"Not like that. I wanna hire you, like I said. I need information about somebody."</i>
</p><p>
  <i>"Oh, yeah? Who?"</i>
</p><p>
  <i>"Me."</i>
</p><p>Jessica Jones gets a new client. One who comes with a metal arm, a duffel bag full of cash, and a surprising willingness to believe in the possibility of mind control.</p><p>Oh, and a lot of questions about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. AKA I'm With The Avengers

This is how it starts:

"I want you to find my husband," says the woman in the client chair. She's middle-aged, but obviously what Jessica thinks of as an indoor cat: smooth skin, relatively few crow's feet around the eyes, a certain soft plumpness about the body that says she hasn't missed many meals plus a certain sinewy grace that says she hasn't skipped the gym, either. Her blonde hair is at least partly dyed to hide the beginnings of gray, but it's a good, subtle job. She's conservatively dressed in medium-blue mom jeans, a soft dark-green sweater, and slightly expensive knee-high brown boots. She reminds Jessica a little bit of her own mom, or what she might have been like if she'd lived.

The thought makes Jessica want to change the subject.

"Your husband's missing?" she asks. All business.

"For almost two years," the woman says. "He went to work one day, and just—never came home."

"And you're just looking for him now ... why?" Jessica arches an eyebrow.

"I suppose we want closure."

"For God's sake, Mom," says the skinny teenage girl in the other client chair (Jessica makes enough now to justify the occasional trip to Ikea). "Just tell her."

Jessica studies the girl. Lanky and pale, with what's probably her mom's blonde hair tied in a ratty braid. She's wearing an old, oversized MIT sweatshirt that used to belong to someone with bigger wrists; the cuffs are stretched out. Her dad's, probably. The kid's maybe fifteen, too young for normal college applications, and doesn't have that creepy child-prodigy air about her.

"Why don't you tell me?" Jessica asks her, keeping her voice neutral.

The girl scoffs. "We've been getting, like, _weird_ phone calls. At, like, three in the morning and stuff? Asking for my dad. And asking a bunch of weird-ass questions."

"Language, Sophie," the mom murmurs, but the kid ignores her.

"What kind of questions?" Jessica asks.

"Some of it's like, where is he, when's he coming back. But the guy keeps asking something else, too. He keeps asking where he put it."

"Where who put what?" Jessica frowns.

"I don't know. The question's just, 'Where did he put it?' I guess my dad had something that belonged to the creep."

Jessica cocks her head. "So why send me after your dad? Wouldn't it be simpler to tell the cops about your mystery caller?"

The mom clears her throat.

"Well," Sophie says, drawing out the word like it's ten syllables long, "there's the way the guy _knows_ stuff. He kinda ... babbles? And I was gonna write him off as crazy at first. But he knows Dad's a Red Sox fan, and it's not like there's a lot of _those_ around here. He knows what kind of cologne he wears, and one time he talked about the tie I made him for Father's Day when I was six. Creeper asked if those were my handprints on it."

"So he knows your dad?" Jessica asks.

Sophie rolls her eyes. "It's so weird. Dad lost that tie, like, years ago. So Mystery Creeper, he and Dad go way back, but Dad never mentioned him. And Mystery Creeper keeps talking about seeing Dad in places where he's never been."

"Like where?"

"Afghanistan," says the mom before Sophie can answer.

Jessica sits back in her chair. "So you think your husband had secrets."

"I know he did," the woman replies calmly. "I simply want to find out what they are before they threaten what's left of our family."

"And before Creeper finds our house," Sophie mutters.

Jessica gives them a copy of her rate sheet and a standard contract to sign. The retainer will cover her rent for a month.

The husband is, or possibly was, a button-down kind of guy named Bob McManus. MIT graduate with a specialty in neuroscience, though he ended up with a mundane office job at some kind of think tank. There are no anomalies in the family's financial records, nothing in Bob's online activity that suggests he was doing anything unsavory—no secret girlfriends or drug habits, no mystery deposits, and nothing remotely connected to the possibility that good old Bob was some kind of spook. Hell, he didn't even bet on baseball. Jessica would be dying of boredom if she weren't getting paid for this shit.

The think tank shut down around the time Bob disappeared—lost its funding, according to the paperwork Jessica digs up. But there's something funny about that, and she spots it immediately.

Bob's office in Staten Island hasn't been rented out to a new tenant. It's been sitting empty since spring of 2014. 

Who the hell can afford to let New York real estate sit empty for more than a year?

The building is an anonymous gray box in a Staten Island industrial park. Jessica is ready to break the padlock on the gate, except that when she gets there she discovers it's already been crushed like a Coke can.

Well. That's not a worrying sign at all.

She lets herself inside, pushing the gate back into place as if it were locked and being careful not to leave any prints. The way her luck runs, she figures, she'll probably find a mutilated corpse on the reception desk or something.

But there isn't a mutilated corpse on the reception desk. There's something Jessica can't help finding just a little bit creepier.

There's a pink cardboard box full of—she flips back the lid—yup, donuts. She pokes a sprinkled one. It's rock-hard.

Donuts from 2014. No, not creepy at all.

Jessica walks silently through the building, studying the place like it's a crime scene, or the home of a missing person. Except for the fine film of dust everywhere, the place doesn't look abandoned. It hasn't been cleared out, certainly. The computers are still on the desks, cubicles littered with employees' personal crap. Pictures of dogs and children pinned to gray fabric walls. Bobbleheads and desk toys. Novelty coffee mugs saying things like _World's Best Mom_ or _Fantasy Football MVP_. Some of them have dead clots of mold in the bottoms, as if they were left sitting with coffee too long and the fungus died when the moisture evaporated.

Some of the chairs still have coats draped over them, as if the owners have just stepped away for a moment.

Obviously Bob wasn't the only think-tank employee who vanished abruptly.

Jessica creeps through the office building, floor by floor, snapping pictures with her phone. There's no blood, no overturned furniture, no sign of struggle or distress.

_A fire drill_ , she thinks on the third floor she checks. _Like in elementary school. You go outside, you line up on the playground, and then they let you go back in for your backpack and shit. Except nobody came back. Didn't even have time to eat the donuts._

_So where's the fire?_

She's just heading up to the fourth floor when she hears the blood-curdling scream coming from the basement.

She knows it's coming from a basement. Nothing else has quite that muffled echo, plus there was one time Kilgrave—

_Stop. We're not doing this today._

Anyway—basement. Definitely. Someone is screaming in the basement. Except this building doesn't _have_ a basement. Today just keeps getting better.

She heads down to the ground floor and prowls through the offices until she finds the spot where the screaming—and other noises, she can hear lots of crashing and thumping now that she's close enough—is loudest. There's probably a secret door somewhere. Secret door to a secret basement. In the creepy deserted office with its abandoned donuts. Of _course_ there's a secret door.

Jessica stomps hard, and punches right through the floor tiles. Because screw secret.

It takes her about ninety seconds to batter her way through the floor into the basement and drop down through the hole. The screaming never falters.

She lands in a big, dark room, lit only by the crazy flickering of a fluorescent light fixture that —in the occasional instants it's lit—looks like it's been punched. Just like everything else in the place. There are banks of computers with smashed screens and ripped-out wiring and circuit boards. Filing cabinets torn asunder. The floor is littered with pieces of machinery and electronics, plus a lot of paper and file folders and what looks like—

_Is that a tray of scalpels?_

Oh, and there's a burly guy with a gleaming metal arm screaming and punching the hell out of what looks like a dentist's chair. Because of course there is.

Metal Arm screams like he's having a root canal done without anesthetic (which might be what the chair was for, now that Jessica thinks about it). He whirls around, throwing aside what looks like a chair arm with his metal hand, and his non-metal hand snaps up with a nine-millimeter leveled at Jessica's face.

He snarls something in Russian.

"Whoa, whoa!" Jessica yelps, raising both hands and taking a step back. "Chill!"

The big guy repeats his sentence, his voice quieter but no less rough.

"I don't speak that," Jessica says, enunciating clearly. "You got any English? _English?_ " God, why did it have to be guns? Bad enough Metal Arm was obviously big and strong. She could _handle_ big and strong. But she wasn't bulletproof. 

_Note to self: next time Luke wants to tag along on a job, let him!_

Metal Arm blinks, shakes his head, and growls for several seconds before gritting his teeth and grinding out, "Who ... are ... you?"

No point in lying without knowing what kind of lie would work. Somehow _you've won the lottery_ and I'm with the government both seem like nonstarters. Besides, she's just come through the ceiling.

Although that _does_ give her an idea. Something better than a lone PI nobody would miss.

"I'm ... with the Avengers," she says.

That earns her four seconds of staring, followed by a snort of contempt. "You ain't even," he says, with a surprisingly sharp New York accent. It's so strong it almost sounds fake.

"I just punched through a floor," Jessica points out. "And I had breakfast with Captain America this morning."

Something changes in Metal Arm's face. For a moment, Jessica recognizes his expression—it's the one she sees in the mirror, some days, when she's cleaning herself up, getting ready for the day, and talking to Trish on speakerphone. It's a face she'd never actually show to Trish, of course, but it's there all the same.

Loneliness. Longing.

"Can't kid a kidder," he says finally. "Who are you _really_ , and what the hell are you doin' in a mothballed Hydra facility?"

Hydra? Well, shit. Suddenly Bob McManus's timeline starts to make sense. And the state of the office, too. Nobody grabs the donut box when they're running from the SHIELD-Hydra apocalypse.

"Jessica Jones," she says grudgingly. "Private investigator. I'm looking into the disappearance of a guy who worked here. His wife and daughter sent me." Technically, it's only Mrs. McManus who hired her, but it's best to make this guy as sympathetic as possible. Kids are good for that, if they're not actually around.

"McManus?" Metal Arm says. "Shit. _Shit_. He had a _kid?_ "

Jessica notes the past tense. "You knew him?"

Metal Arm's face darkens. "Yeah. You for hire?"

"As a rule. You know where McManus is?"

"'Course." Metal Arm lowers the gun, but keeps eyeing her. "You mind if I try a little word association here?"

Jessica arches an eyebrow. "Why not?"

"If I was to say, 'Cut off one head,' you'd say—?"

"Put it on a cop's desk."

"What?"

"What?"

They stare at each other for several seconds, until Metal Arm scoffs again. "What-the-hell-ever. I knew you wasn't Hydra anyway."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," he says nastily. "Hydra knows where the goddamn door is." He shakes his head. "You know what? I ain't in the mood now. I tell you what. I'll get you what you need on McManus if you do me a favor."

"What's the favor?"

"I gotta job for you. A pretty goddamn weird one. But I figure, you're smart enough to find this place an' you're gonna be out of a case when I give you the info, so you won't be too busy to take my gig." He rattles off an address. "I'll be there in twenty-four hours, with everything I got on McManus. You take it off my hands, you take my job, we're square."

"I'm not taking anything until I'm done with this case," Jessica lies. "After that, I'll listen."

"Fair enough." He holsters the gun. "Get outta here. Building's gonna blow in about ten minutes."

"Why?"

He locks eyes with her. "'Cause whoever you think McManus is, I can goddamn guarantee you're wrong."

—

To Jessica's relief and total lack of surprise, the address is a bar. A dingy, scummy dive bar that obviously serves three things: beer, whisky, and broken bones.

Jessica gets there half an hour before the appointed time and finds Metal Arm already ensconced in a back booth, taking swigs from a half-empty bottle of Four Roses. She orders Jack Daniels as she sits down.

Metal Arm pushes a small cardboard box across the table to her. It looks like a gift box. Cautiously, she opens it, keeping her face carefully impassive.

Inside is an employee ID for Bob McManus. And a bloody molar.

"McManus," says Metal Arm quietly, "worked for Hydra. The files are online, in the Black Widow dump. Go ahead and check me. But yeah, I knew him. He used to strap me into that chair, shove a rubber guard between my teeth, and throw a switch to send a million volts through my brain." He spits the words, almost like a challenge.

"You seem awfully alive for that," Jessica observes. 

"I'm tougher than I look."

"Say I believe you. Why would McManus do that?"

Metal Arm starts to chuckle darkly. "I looked you up, Jones. I read about you. So I'm gonna make your day. That chair? That was Hydra's _mind-control_ system. Just like your asshole Kilgrave, except, y'know, nobody had to say please."

"Neither did Kilgrave," Jessica says coldly.

"Look me up. There ain't as much about me, but it's there. The Winter Soldier. Anyway, yeah, I killed McManus. Tracked him down 'bout a year ago. Kept the tooth so I could look at it sometimes, when I get nightmares about him. I've been taking out everybody who still knows how to do that shit to me." He hefts his bottle in salute. "Just like you."

Jessica scowls at him. "So why give me the tooth? Nightmares all gone now?"

The Winter Soldier snorts. " _Hell_ no. But ..." He bites his lower lip. "I didn't know the sonofabitch had a kid, you know? Not a kid who cared. He had that stupid tie once, yeah, but that don't mean nothin'. But if she's still lookin' for him ..." He shrugs. "I got no problem with her. She never did anything to me. I figure she needs this stuff more'n I do."

The penny dropped, belatedly. "You're the guy who's been calling their house?"

The Winter Soldier nods. "Thought they'd know where he put something I need."

Jessica tilts her head and looks at the molar. "Well, if Daddy was Hydra, they probably won't want his stuff anymore. Mostly they just want you to go away. I'll bet they'd give up whatever it is. What're you looking for?"

The Winter Soldier takes a swallow of whiskey. "My memories."

Jessica gives him a flat look.

"They had me hooked into this machine," he says, looking down at the stained tabletop. "They could put things into my head. False memories, y'know? So suddenly I can speak Russian or some shit, or I remember growing up on a farm when it turns out I'm from friggin' New York. And I thought—maybe they kept my real memories somewhere, like a backup. I guess it's kinda stupid. They sure as hell didn't have much use for the old me. Probably 'cause I fought 'em so much."

"What, Hydra _kidnapped_ you and turned you into a crazy Nazi superhero?" One of these days, Jessica reflects, her mouth will get her into trouble she can't get out of.

The Winter Soldier glowers at her. "You got your goddamn answers. Go check my story, talk to your clients. An' if you want that job after, I'll pay double your rate for basic PI shit. Nothin' illegal, even. And I'm paying cash." He slides a slip of paper across the table. There's a phone number written on it in a slightly shaky hand.

Jessica takes the box and the paper both.

—

The McManus family isn't happy with the news, but a hundred pages of printouts from the Black Widow file dump convinces them that it's true. Mrs. McManus stares into space while Sophie interrogates Jessica about her dealings with the Winter Soldier. The kid gets paler as the conversation goes on.

"Why would Dad do that?" she whispers, finally.

Jessica shakes her head. She's spent a nasty, sleepless night reading everything the file dump had on the Winter Soldier. "Nobody thought he was a person. When somebody does everything you say, it's ... pretty easy to forget there's somebody in there."

Sophie looks sick. She goes upstairs and comes down ten minutes later with a banker's box. 

"Take it," she says. "That's everything from his office. Just make him stop calling."

The box is full of electronic crap. CDs and DVDs. Flash drives. An external hard drive. An _internal_ hard drive that looks like it's been ripped out.

"This should do it," Jessica tells her. "He seems pretty focused on getting his memories back. I'll give him this, and he'll probably move on. No point in harassing you if you don't have anything he wants."

"I hope it's there," Sophie murmurs.

"Sophie!" her mother snaps. "How can you say that?"

Sophie whirls. "Because it's true!" she snarls. "You saw the proof! Dad was a rotten bastard, and he _tortured_ somebody, and all the guy wants is his _memories_ back!"

"That man killed your father!"

"And it sounds like Dad deserved it!"

The shouting goes on for a few minutes. Jessica waits patiently until everyone runs out of words. She leaves half an hour later with her final check and a box of digital garbage.

The Winter Soldier's words echo in her ears. _I didn't know the sonofabitch had a kid, you know? Not a kid who cared._

—

She calls the number, and as soon as it picks up, she says, "It's me. I got every file your guy had at his house. It's all yours if you leave the family alone."

There's a long pause on the other end of the line. If Jessica were a friendlier person, she'd ask if the Winter Soldier is still there. Maybe he's had an aneurysm or something. The guy's brain really should be pudding, if the file dump is anything to go by.

Then: 

"You wanna get a drink sometime?"

Jessica blinks. _Wasn't expecting that one._ "I'm kinda in a relationship right now," she says, thinking of Luke. "Friends with no benefits."

"Not like that. I wanna hire you, like I said. I need information about somebody."

"Oh, yeah? Who?"

"Me."


	2. AKA Who The Hell Is Bucky?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"In my line of work, you find out people don't always ask for what they really want. Sometimes you have to guess."_
> 
> Jessica takes a job working for the Winter Soldier. It doesn't turn out the way anybody expects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas, everyone.

The bar is, if anything, even dirtier this time around. Jessica's getting to like the place.

"So you read about me," the Winter Soldier says, taking the box from Jessica's hand before she sits down.

"Google Translate is shit at Russian," Jessica says flatly, "but yeah, I got the gist. Hope you're not looking to start a support group or anything, because I don't even know where I'd get a talking stick."

"A what?"

"Never mind. You said you had a job for me?"

The Winter Soldier nods. "If this shit doesn't have my memories in it, I'm kinda out of leads. So I gotta get it back the old-fashioned way. That's where you come in. I wanna hire you to find out whatever you can about the guy I used to be. The more personal, the better."

Jessica frowns. "You're like thirty. There's gotta be people around who knew you back in the day. Why don't you go talk to them?"

A bitter smile plays at his lips. "You read the files?"

"Some, yeah."

"Musta missed the dates. Hydra captured me in _1945_. My first mission as the Winter Soldier was sometime in the 1950s." He shrugs. "I'm well-preserved for my age." Something about that sentence makes him chuckle, like he's laughing at his own joke and he doesn't expect her to get it.

Jessica arches an eyebrow. "There's not gonna be a lot, then. It'll take time. What's your budget?"

"Unlimited." He takes a swallow of Four Roses. "I can keep knockin' over Hydra stockpiles and bumpin' off mob bosses as long as I need to. As long as you take unmarked bills, we're in business as long as we wanna be."

"Hmph." Jessica leans back in her chair and studies the Winter Soldier skeptically. "Why me?"

"Well, obviously you're tough as shit." He nods in appreciation. "You found a mothballed Hydra base in nothing flat, so you're probably pretty good. And you can't exactly complain if I'm paranoid or anything like that, because you know what mind control does."

"Huh." Jessica folds her arms. "Okay, I've got a couple of conditions."

"Name 'em."

"You pay in advance. Weekly." She names a figure. The Winter Soldier nods. "I'll need a way to contact you. Phone number, email address, something. In case of emergencies." There's another nod. "I can't exactly make you sign a contract, but I'll give you a copy of my standard so you know my usual terms. Most of them apply here, except I'm taking cash instead of checks. And finally." She holds up her phone. "I need a good, recognizable photo of you."

He blanches. "What for?"

"Uploading it to a cloud site, in case I mysteriously disappear. My friends, whom you do _not_ want to meet, will check it if anything goes wrong."

The Winter Soldier grumbles, but sits up straight and arranges his face into a grim approximation of a smile. The light's okay. Jessica snaps the photo.

"Okay," she says, looking at it. "We're in business. Tell me everything you already know about the old you, and I'll use it as a starting point."

"There ain't much." He pulls a small notebook— _how old-fashioned_ —out of a pocket and scribbles down a couple of lines. He rips the page neatly and passes it across the table.

_James Buchanan Barnes. Born 3-10-17, Brooklyn, NY. Sergeant, 107th Infantry, U.S. Army, 1943–1945. Serial number 32557038._

He stares at her, obviously waiting for some kind of reaction.

The first thing Jessica thinks is _Military records, I know a guy who'll help out with those. And he's from New York, so I can check school records, newspaper morgues. Census data, for a baseline._

The second thing she thinks is: _What am I missing?_

Because the Winter— _Barnes_ is staring at her like he expects her to recognize his name. Does he have some personal connection to her, or Trish? No, he's been gone way too long. So maybe he's famous. Or infamous. Historical? The 107th Infantry ... she's heard that name before, but it's not like she was ever a big World War II buff. Though Trish went through a pretty embarrassing history-crush on Captain—

Her mouth falls open slightly.

Barnes scowls at her. 

She snatches up the pen and scribbles five hasty letters and a punctuation mark on the piece of paper, then spins it around to show him.

_BUCKY?_

The scowl gets even darker. "Yeah," he growls. "Don't call me that. You ain't earned the right."

Fair enough. It's not like she lets clients call her _Jess._ "So," she says slowly, "does Captain America know about," she nods at him, "everything?"

"Some." The word sounds like he's spitting out a bone. "But he's off-limits, got it? I don't want him involved. Don't go talk to him or anything."

"Gonna make the job a lot harder," Jessica shoots back. "Not talking to the guy who knows more about you than anybody else."

"I ain't paying for easy, Jones."

She's definitely getting a lot of billable hours out of this one.

—

She starts with the paper trail. Birth certificate. School records. The high school Barnes and Steve Rogers attended has a little shrine to the two of them outside the principal's office, now spruced up with a signed photo of the resurrected Captain America. There are also a couple of dusty medals behind glass, and a black-and-white group photo with two faces circled in red marker. Apparently Bucky Barnes was a prizewinning runner and Steve Rogers was a devoted member of the school debating society. He's front row center in the club picture. Barnes is in the back row, lurking.

She takes pictures of all of it, and raids the old yearbooks in the library for class photos. On a whim, she tries the next few years' worth of yearbooks and searches for anyone else named Barnes. She finds three girls with that surname, all with the expressive eyes and full mouth of the Winter Soldier. One of them—the oldest, Rebecca—has a smirk Jessica recognizes from the background of Trish's old Cap photos. Jessica takes pictures of all of it.

Back to City Hall. There are marriage records for two of the sisters and a death certificate for one who didn't make it to the altar. That leads to cemetery records and a local Catholic parish that has a few dusty photos of dark-haired, smirking Barneses at weddings, funerals and First Communions. There's a waifish blond boy in the background of a few of them. Jessica wonders how she looks in Trish's old photos. Sullen, probably. A shadowy footnote in Trish's glittering life. Except the shadow knows what's under the glitter.

It's funny how Barnes and Rogers orbit each other. She's heard so much about them over the years, and the phrase _best friends since childhood_ is used almost every time. But she's never thought about it before. _Best friends since childhood_ means _there for everything_. Every schoolyard scrap, every Sunday dinner. Every winter cold—pneumonia, in Rogers' case—and every summer sunburn. Every tragedy and every triumph. Every secret, too: crushes, first kisses, closely held dreams. 

James Buchanan Barnes is a spiderweb of information, more holes than strands, but Steve Rogers sits in the middle of it. He knows _all_ this shit. So why doesn't Barnes want her talking to him?

On she goes. The Brooklyn Y still has boxing trophies with Barnes' name on them in its display case. Guy was All-City. That gives her an idea.

It takes her three tries before she finds the right crumbling gym with the right old-timers kibitzing.

"Bucky Barnes?" an old man wheezes when she asks. "Hell, yeah, I remember him. Guy taught me to throw a sweetheart of a right hook. Useta teach all the kids. Couple of 'em went all the way, too. They useta brag about how they took boxin' lessons with Captain America." He brays a laugh. "Not that the little punk could throw a punch back then!" He sobers. "But you watch who you ask about Barnes 'round here, lady. Cap, he lives in this neighborhood, an' he likes his privacy, an' we take care of our own. You ain't one'a them photographers, are ya?" He squints. "Tryin' to make a million dollars offa picture of him cryin' over Bucky?"

"Definitely not." Jessica holds up her hands. "I'm just doing research for a member of the family." Well, it wasn't a lie. 

"It's a good idea. There's about a million books about 'em, but they all got Bucky wrong. You want the straight of it, you talk to his sister."

Jessica blinks. "He's got a sister who's still alive?"

"Lady, that girl will outlive us all."

—

Rebecca Proctor _(call me Becca, honey, everybody does)_ is a wiry little old woman with a piercing silver-blue stare and a smirk that's beginning to haunt Jessica's dreams. She bakes cookies like they're weapons of mass destruction and she doesn't care about international treaties.

Jessica eats four. PI work doesn't lend itself to regular mealtimes, especially with a superhuman metabolism. Becca talks about her brother for two hours while Jessica records it all on her phone.

"You know, it's funny," she says as Jessica reaches for her last cookie. "I been interviewed a coupla times before I started giving them historians the bum's rush, but nobody's ever asked me so much about Bucky before. Most people wanna know about _Captain America_." She says the words like they taste bad.

"You don't like him?" Jessica asks, popping a Lemon Lassie into her mouth. 

Becca snorts. It's exactly like the noise Barnes makes. "I like Steve Rogers just fine, that little shit. Little Stevie who used to put newspapers in his shoes, he's okay. Captain America, not so much." Her look of contempt softens into sadness. "Bucky never liked what they did to him, makin' him into a showgirl like that. It wasn't him. And they left Bucky out of it entirely, or they turned him inta some jailbait twink." She shakes her head. "I know history is written by the winners, but those boys didn't deserve to lose the way they did." 

Jessica shifts uncomfortably. That's something she's discovered independently several times on this job. Everybody who remembers Bucky Barnes _likes_ him, and Steve Rogers, too, but everybody also thinks the two of them got history's rawest deal. It's taken every bit of fake charm she has to get people to talk to her at all, and even then, it's mostly because she's asking about Barnes, who's safely dead and can't exactly have his privacy invaded. Something tells her that if she opened with questions about Rogers, she'd be on her ass in an alley in ten seconds flat, and to hell with her strength.

"You know who you _really_ oughta talk to?" Becca asks, pursing her lips.

—

_I'm gonna get shot. I just know it._

The scrubs weren't hard to come by, and by this point Jessica's impersonated a nurse enough times that she can slip into the nursing home as a visitor, change in the bathroom, and stroll into her chosen room unopposed.

It's getting _out_ that will be the problem. For a nursing home, this place is amazingly well-guarded. She counted four guns hidden under scrubs on her way in here.

_What the hell is this place?_

The room is bright and airy, one of the nicest in the place if what Jessica's seen through open doorways is any indication. And this door was closed, with a note on it asking the staff not to leave it ajar. Privacy, in a hospital.

She puts on her perky _you're a winner!_ voice as she bustles in with a tray.

" _Good_ afternoon, Mrs.—"

"Don't move."

Jessica looks up from her tray. _God damn it._

There's _another_ gun pointed at her.

The woman sitting up in the bed is small, frail-looking, white-haired and sunken-eyed. But her wrinkled hands are steady on the little .22 pistol, and she's got a cool smile on her pale lips.

"Holy shit," Jessica says, before her brain can switch her filter on. She slowly sets the tray down on the bedside table and raises her hands.

"I'm running a little pool," the woman in the bed says. She has a British accent, but it's a few rungs up the social ladder from Kilgrave's, so Jessica's all right for the moment. Kilgrave sounded like a club kid from East London, sometimes. This lady sounds like she has a castle somewhere.

"A pool?" Jessica repeats.

"Just the occasional flutter, you understand," the woman says. "All the staff are in it. So before I decide what to do with you, I'd like to know who sent you."

"How's the betting?" Jessica asks, unable to restrain her curiosity.

"At the moment, Hydra is winning at three to one for assassination attempts, but the Russians are catching up and there's always the possibility of the Chinese."

Jessica briefly ponders whether Barnes qualifies as _the Russians_. It's not like she's asked him for his views on Putin. Then again, who is she kidding? The guy hates Nazis and everybody who even smells like a Nazi. He was best friends with Captain America. Hell, he doesn't even drink vodka.

"Sorry to disappoint," she says. "I'm a PI."

The woman arches an eyebrow. "A private investigator. In _here?_ "

"It's not like getting in here was hard."

"No, it's getting out that's the trick," the woman agrees. "What are you investigating?"

Jessica shrugs fractionally. "I'm looking for information on someone you used to know," she says. "His sister said you were the lady to talk to." 

"Who?"

"There's a picture in my phone. Might be easier if I show you?"

"Slowly," the woman agrees. She's clearly enjoying this.

With exaggerated care, Jessica draws the phone out of the pocket of her scrub top. She opens it, pulls up the picture of Barnes, and passes it to the woman.

Brown eyes widen. "When was this taken? And where?"

"A week ago. Hell's Kitchen. That's in—"

"New York, yes, I know." The woman rubs her thumb gently along the side of the phone, as if wanting to stroke Barnes' face. "My God. Steve _said_ he was alive. I thought I was hearing things." She smiles tenderly at the screen. "Oh, poor Barnes. Poor Jamie."

"Jamie?" Jessica echoes. Even his sister didn't call him that.

" _Bucky_ is a name for a dog, or a child," the woman says sharply, looking up. "We agreed on Jamie." She softens a little. "I named my daughter after them, you know. Sarah, after Steve's mother, and Jamie, for his best friend."

Jessica smiles weakly. "Can I put my hands down now?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Of course you can." The woman slips the gun back under the bedclothes and nods to a visitor's chair. "Sit there. I promise not to shoot you unless you turn out to be _considerably_ more exciting."

Jessica sits. "How'd you spot me so quick?"

A silver eyebrow arches. "Aside from the fact that I know all the staff and their schedules intimately? You said _Missus_." Her eyes gleam. "Everyone here calls me Peggy. Now, what does Jamie want to know?"

—

It fits in a box, eventually, a cardboard banker's box. A month of investigation for this, after Sophie McManus's files came to nothing. Four duffel bags full of unmarked, non-sequential bills—twenties, fifties, hundreds—for one cardboard box. It hardly seems like a fair trade.

But value is in the eye of the beholder, Jessica knows. In her hands, a few grainy pictures of a cheating spouse are worth a week's rent, maybe a month's. In the hands of the right divorce lawyer, they're worth the house, the car, the kids and the dog. The last diary she kept as a whole person is priceless to her, but it was worth less than five minutes of time to Dorothy Walker.

How much would she pay, she wonders, if someone could put the months she lost to Kilgrave in a box? Maybe throw in the ability to sleep, or go a day without crawling into a bottle? The long-lost version of herself that listened to Trish bitch about the ghost of Patsy, that laughed and bought drinks for the whole bar and showed up assholes at pub games?

There isn't enough cash in the world for that. Barnes is getting off easy.

He's sitting at his usual table when she walks in, the one that gives him a view of every entrance and exit, an eyeline on every patron, and a clear escape route. Jessica can relate.

She drops the box on the table and—what the hell?—drags her chair around so she's sitting against the wall beside him. It quiets some of the PTSD demons in her own head, after all. She notices Barnes is staring hungrily at the box, without touching it, just as she notices the full, still-sealed bottle of Jack Daniels sitting next to the partially drained bottle of Four Roses. She grabs it.

"Mind if I ask you a question?" she asks, cracking the seal and opening her bottle.

Barnes grunts.

Jessica nods at his choice of beverage. "Why Four Roses? You don't really seem like a bourbon kinda guy. And it's pretty high-end shit for a guy who drinks in dive bars."

Barnes stares, unblinking, at the box for a couple of seconds longer. Then he shivers, visibly forces himself to look at his bottle, and grabs it to take a swallow. He thunks it down a little too hard when he's done and rasps, "Can't get drunk."

Jessica waits. This sounds like a story.

"I wanted to," Barnes goes on. "After. You know. _God_ , I wanted." He shakes his head wearily.

Jessica nods. She knows the feeling. Hell, it's why Barnes already knows to buy her Jack.

"But I couldn't. Something they did to me ... I can't, anymore. Can't get drunk."

"I heard Steve Rogers can't, either," Jessica offers. It's as close to consoling as she gets.

A grim smile pulls at Barnes' mouth. "We was always gonna test that one day," he says, his old-timey Noo Yawk accent bleeding through thick and sharp. "Never hadda chance. Anyway. I drank like a fish for maybe a week, got real pissed off. It was another thing they took from me, y'know?"

Jessica nods, thinking of Italian food. She actually kind of liked pasta amatriciana before Kilgrave came along.

"And then I thought—what the hell?" He digs a human fingernail under the label and starts to peel it. "I'm knockin' over enough asshole bases to keep myself in greenbacks for a hundred years. If I'm drinkin' whiskey just for the taste, I might as well have the good stuff. And I was in this guy's house—mansion, more like. I'd just blown his Hydra brains all over his nice study wall. And he had a liquor cabinet in there. An unopened bottle of Four Roses Single Barrel. I damn near cried." He sighs. "They had this stuff when I was a person, you know? Dugan, he traded five packs of smokes for one bottle in London one time. The man loved his bourbon. Four Roses, it was good shit." He pulls on the label, easing the corner off. "It ain't the same anymore. But it's close, and it burns. Sometimes that's the best you can get."

Jessica takes a swallow of her own whiskey to hide her expression.

"What's in the box?" Barnes asks, in a surprisingly small voice.

"A lot of stuff," Jessica admits. "Some of it's on flash drives, some on paper. I dug up information on your family. Found a couple of people who knew you when you were a kid. Your sister Becca's still alive—did you know that?"

He shakes his head.

"Well, her address is in there if you want to look her up. I didn't tell her who hired me. And a letter from Peggy Carter, who saw through both of us in about two seconds." She smiles wryly. "There's other stuff. School records. I got your Army file, some reports on missions you went on. A few letters you wrote got reprinted in books, and they're in there. Plus every frame of video that survived the war. It's not the Spielberg treatment, but there's a lot there. There's also a list of personal possessions that ended up in museums or with private collectors, in case you want something back. And a complete bibliography, in case you want to chase something I didn't dig up enough on. Plus the actual report, which runs about twenty pages. More writing than I've done since college."

Barnes presses his lips together until they're white. "I—"

Jessica sips her whiskey and waits.

"What's your read on me?"

She blinks. "What do you mean?"

"Was I—?" He growls in frustration. "Look, I know what I am _now_. I'm a goddamn monster. Okay. Fine. But how much of that's Hydra, and how much of that's—?"

He trails off.

Jessica takes another sip, and then prompts, "You?"

He nods.

She studies the room for a while, mouthing at the bottle, wondering how to answer. If Trish were here, she'd gush about what a good guy Bucky Barnes was, how he's a national icon and really smoking hot to boot. Malcolm would ask questions, pry into what Barnes wants to hear and why he wants to hear it. Luke wouldn't say anything at all; he'd let Barnes figure it out himself.

She thinks about everything she's heard. About rose-tinted childhood memories and raucous war stories. About vanished little boys with bloody knuckles and matching smirks. About hard-edged military reports and shadowy footnotes in history books. 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

She pulls the bottle out of her mouth with a soft _pop_ , wipes it sloppily to get some of the spit off, and slides it over in front of Barnes.

"I'd drink with you," she says, and it's as close as she comes to a smile.

He almost smiles himself, and tips the bottle into his mouth. As he drinks, he shifts in his seat, and she hears the familiar sound of a nylon duffel bag sliding across the scuffed wood floor. She looks down. The top is slightly unzipped. Nothing but hundreds, this time. At least, nothing she can see.

Hell of a tip. She looks back up.

"There's one other thing in the box you should know about," she says when he's done and passing the bottle back. She lifts the top off the box and pulls out the first of two manila folders. _James Buchanan Barnes_ is written neatly on the front of it. She drops it beside the Four Roses. _Slap._

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. In my line of work, you find out people don't always ask for what they really want. Sometimes you have to guess."

Barnes goes very still.

"When I met you, you were looking for your memories. Makes sense, since that's what was taken from you. So you hired me to find out about you, which also makes sense—until I actually start talking to people who know what you were like."

"I don't exactly remember—" he begins.

"Shut up, I'm on a roll." She lifts the second, thicker folder out of the box and holds it up so the writing on the front faces away from Barnes. "See, you're in the history books, Barnes. And yeah, they got a lot of shit wrong, but they got the gist when they tried. Like I said, I'd have a drink with you. So you don't need a PI to tell you that. Google would do. Which brings me back to what you _really_ want. I know a few things about memory. And you know what I don't really bother remembering all that much?"

"What?" he asks grudgingly.

"Me." She smirks. "I _know_ I'm a piece of work. So I figure, if I lost my memories, and I could Google to see what a piece of work I am, I wouldn't want _those_ memories back. Or they wouldn't be my top priority, because I'm not a narcissist. And _you're_ not a narcissist, either, because a narcissist wouldn't hand a tooth over to give a kid he's never met something to bury. So I figure you're really after something else."

Now Barnes is eying the second folder like it might explode. "Which is?"

Jessica thinks about six horrible months when she lived in squat after squat, shaking and whimpering through every night she didn't drink herself into a stupor. About her phone buzzing as her terrified best friend tried to find her, make sure she was all right. About her desperation to feel safe, feel human, feel like _herself_ again, after everything. Not for her own sake, either. She was so sure then that she was a piece of shit and always would be. She didn't think she deserved to be human. But she couldn't face Trish any other way. Trish deserved better than Jessica could ever be.

She's starting to see, now, what a crock of shit that was. She's starting to understand what Trish sees. What Malcolm and Luke and Robyn and the others see.

But Barnes isn't there yet. He's still shivering in the dark. Hasn't yet admitted what this job is really about, has always been about.

He wants to remember himself. But the path to James Buchanan Barnes doesn't run through the Winter Soldier anymore, or even through Brooklyn. Maybe it never did. And the reason he wants to remember himself is not—yet—because he thinks _he_ deserves to have the old Bucky Barnes back.

She thinks about the memories she'd miss, if she lost them. She thinks about Luke, and Malcolm, and Ruben. 

About Trish.

She drops the second folder on top of the first. Face up, so the writing is visible.

_Steven Grant Rogers._

"You want to remember him," she says.

Barnes closes his eyes. And Jessica knows she's right, and settles in to tell the story.

"His mom's name was Sarah," she begins. "He used to wear newspapers in his shoes."

This is how it starts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Full disclosure: I HATE BOURBON. I drink very little alcohol, but bourbon is the worst. I hate everything about it, but especially the smell. It has horrible associations for me. But Bucky was pretty obviously drinking whiskey in TFA, and Dugan had a thing for bourbon, so I swallowed my nausea and when I looked up popular varieties of whiskey from the 1940s and discovered Four Roses was still being made, I knew I had Bucky's drink of choice. Then, completely by accident, I discovered that 1) Four Roses is considered a somewhat high-end bourbon, so it does not belong in a dive bar, and 2) it was considered good stuff in the 1940s, but the distillery was bought up by Seagrams in 1943, and after World War II the only Four Roses sold in the U.S. was rotgut. (They still sold the good stuff under that name in Europe and Asia.) Only recently did Four Roses get bought AGAIN, and now they're selling what is apparently good bourbon in the U.S. So Four Roses was great stuff until the late 1940s, and then it was horrible until quite recently, and now it's good again. Sound like anyone we know?
> 
> 2\. Absolutely none of Jessica's feelings about Trish are autobiographical. Not a one. Nope.
> 
> 3\. PEGGY CARTER IS MY QUEEN.
> 
> 4\. It is my headcanon that the Barnes/Jones Drinking Society will eventually grow to include Clint Barton.
> 
> 5\. The shower-voices are quieter now and another installment of Agent Carter and the Left-Hand Man is next.
> 
> 6\. I am on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there. Join me for Bucky Barnes, Peggy Carter, 10% other stuff, and the opportunity to ruin a particular fascist's day just by existing.

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooo, confession time. Approximately a billion years ago, I trained as an investigative journalist. I was pretty good at it. I was especially good at 1) finding patterns in huge heaps of data and 2) getting people to tell me things that they would tell their best friend but not their boss. So while PTSD, a global economic crash and an allergy to coffee put a serious damper on the old journalism career, I remain interested in poking my nose where it doesn't belong and digging up random facts. It's handy in my actual job, but it also got me interested in how a real-life investigator might dig up a working biography of a guy who went MIA in 1945. Because what if Bucky didn't remember as much as he wanted? And what if he was too proud or worried to admit he needed Steve's help to piece himself back together?
> 
> Plus Bucky and Jessica Jones need to be drinking buddies. Preferably with Clint Barton.


End file.
